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  • The assassination of JFK: One of the US’s biggest mysteries

    The assassination of JFK: One of the US’s biggest mysteries

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    “There’s a kind of psychological dynamic here in that we tend to remake our memories to make sense of how things have gone,” says Ling. “And so the Kennedy assassination becomes seen as this moment when the hopefulness of the 60s starts to falter. By the time Oliver Stone comes out and basically says [Kennedy] is killed by the CIA to enable the Vietnam experiment to go forward, that’s what many Americans sort of want to believe – that it’s all been taken away from them by evil forces.”

    In 1992 – partly as a result of Stone’s film – US Congress passed the John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, leading to the release of millions of previously classified documents about the assassination. They have been released in batches – Biden authorised release of the final batch this year –  and every new burst of information feeds the frenzy further.

    Paul Landis’s shocking new revelation, which comes from his upcoming book The Final Witness, set to be published on 10 October, is sure to shake things up even further.

    “It’s fundamental in what it blows out of the water,” says Ling. Because the bullet was found on Connally’s stretcher, the Warren Commission originally concluded that a single bullet travelled through Kennedy and hit Connally, causing several injuries. It became known as the “magic bullet” – but many were doubtful one bullet could behave this way.

    “If it didn’t go through in that way we are left with unanswered questions as to where the bullet is that hit Connally,” says Ling. “If we start getting more bullets than we can reconcile with the speed of fire that Lee Harvey Oswald could maintain, we’re in a situation where there has to be somebody else shooting.”

    Ling though, has doubts about the credibility of this new information. There are questions over why Landis waited so long to reveal it (he says he avoided anything about the assassination for years), and it’s certainly stirred up interest in his book. In a piece for Vanity Fair, historian James Robenalt says he believes Landis. He has called the findings “the most significant news in the assassination since 1963.”

    It’s too soon to tell where this new information will lead, but one thing is certain: it won’t stop people coming up with theories on what happened that day. “It’s a whodunnit that everybody knows,” says Ling. “But no-one has the final chapter.”

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  • How grisly thriller Dead Man’s Shoes captured British small-town violence

    How grisly thriller Dead Man’s Shoes captured British small-town violence

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    To achieve such a humane approach, Meadows filmed chronologically, encouraging improvisation in rehearsals to fully flesh out even the most diabolical of his characters. It’s how Paddy Considine ended up with a green army jacket – he wanted to pay homage to Sylvester Stallone in First Blood – and a random gas mask which helped him get into character. The results are effective. “When [one of the thugs] Herbie thinks he’s striking a deal for his life, and then he gets that awful [knifing], and you can hear the fluid dripping out from the knife wound. I was watching that live, and we weren’t quite sure how Paddy was going to play it. It was frightening. That’s almost where he’s becoming a monster himself, playing psychological games to wreak that revenge. He’s becoming like the people who did what they did to his brother.”

    Reckoning with revenge

    In retrospect, the film’s interest in the complexity and futility of violent revenge does feel part of a running thread in Meadows’ work. In 2019, in an interview with The Guardian before his TV series The Virtues aired, Meadows spoke for the first time about a long-repressed childhood sexual assault he experienced, an incident that haunted him, and has perhaps informed his work. The Virtues is arguably Meadows’ most mature and haunting output, and features a masterclass in performance from Stephen Graham as a man searching through the pieces of a similarly traumatic past.

    When I say that rewatching Dead Man’s Shoes tale of reckoning between closure and payback drew some parallels with The Virtues, Meadows says: “I won’t go into The Virtues on a personal level too much, but, over the course of [reckoning with the assault], I had a decision to make for myself. I’m not saying it was on the scale of Dead Man’s Shoes. But there was a part of me that wanted to give someone a right good hiding. But I thought, I’ve got two choices here. And maybe the best thing I can do is use the tools that I’ve learned to use best, which is actually to make something about it, rather than try and go back to my life 20 years ago and get into an excessive sort of street fight scenario. So I’ve not got to the roots of some of those things in myself, but [with Dead Man’s Shoes] I was already kind of starting to think, well: forgiveness is the answer.”

    That the men of Dead Man’s Shoes are too poisonous or blind to see that until it’s too late is undoubtedly part of the point, but there’s no judgement here. “Sometimes it wasn’t the case of wanting to be this cockfighting uber-man kind of character,” Meadows says of his rough-and-tumble past. “You were almost protecting yourself like a shield. So my interest in masculinity has always been about that complexity, and I’ve been drawn to that my whole life. There’s a grey area to it that’s about more than people just being thugs.”    

    Given the cultural specificity of Dead Man’s Shoes, it’s a perfect crown jewel for a film season like Acting Hard. It is not only about violence, masculinity, or revenge as free-floating academic ideas: it’s about a scenario where all of these things are inextricable from the world they emerge from, and the very act of examining them at all is a step in the right direction. 

    Dead Man’s Shoes is re-released on 15 September. Acting Hard, a season of films exploring working class masculinity, is on now at BFI Southbank until 2 October.

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  • Hear stunning music recorded inside Mississippi’s infamous Parchman prison

    Hear stunning music recorded inside Mississippi’s infamous Parchman prison

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    Olivier is part of a new management regime that took over Parchman Farm in 2020 and has strived to reform the prison. Brennan believes they viewed the musical project as a positive step. “They said, ‘We really do want what’s best for these men.’ There’s been a lot of negative press. I think they wanted to communicate: ‘Look, we really are trying.’”

    Nonetheless, access was tightly controlled. The names of the singers are not listed on the album. None of them were available for interview and we will never see their faces. All that is shared are their voices. “That was the agreement, to make it happen after so long,” says Brennan. “It reflects the ghostly nature of it all. It’s [also] a balance of concern for the victims or victims’ families.” Any money raised from the projects will go to the prison itself.

    Some Mississippi Sunday Morning ends with a raucous full-band jam of the traditional Lay My Burden Down. You can hear the thrill of the performers, and their reluctance to let the moment end. “People ended up hugging each other, smiling, laughing and high-fiving,” says Brennan. “One of the chaplains was live streaming it to one of the heads of the prison. He told me later they were so happy to see this joy inside the prison. In that moment, I felt like, OK, this was a worthwhile endeavour.”

    Parchman Farm Prayer: Some Mississippi Sunday Morning is released by Glitterbeat on 15 September.

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  • What Princess Diana’s sheep jumper really means

    What Princess Diana’s sheep jumper really means

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    In Luella Bartley’s book Luella’s Guide to English Style the author and designer sings the praises of the 80s Sloane Ranger, as “personified” by Diana, in a chapter titled Tribes of Britannia: “My Sloane is the 80s Sloane,” Bartley writes. “The rigidity of her uniform and the rules by which she lives deserve to be preserved. Sloanes wear red, white and blue to fly the flag, announce their loyalties, and stick to what they know. Blue is regimental, nautical, and goes with everything. Red is jolly. White is the colour of school shirts and the snow at Verbier.”

    And the other thing about Sloanes, according to Bartley’s book? “They are good at fun… practical jokes, fancy-dress balls and silly nicknames. What they hate is anyone trying to be clever. They are avowedly anti-intellectual and can’t abide anyone taking him/herself too seriously.” In her red-and-white, “jolly” and cartoonish sheep jumper, with white Peter-Pan blouse and navy jeans – could early 80s Diana at the polo have been any more quintessentially Sloaney?

    A sense of mischief

    Yet although in 1981 Diana was neither an outsider nor much of a rebel, over the following years, according to Eleri Lynn, she did begin to enjoy surprising people with her fashion choices. The sheep jumper was an early indication of this “mischievousness”, as Lynn calls it. “I can’t comment on what she was thinking. But couturiers have described how she did like to be subversive. She did enjoy the idea of surprising people, and dressing with little twists, or something unconventional – for example wearing mismatching evening gloves, one red and one black, wearing a tuxedo trouser suit, patterned tights. Or wearing black, which royal protocol says is only for mourning and funerals. She loved it. And she was totally responsible for her clothes and if she didn’t like it, she wouldn’t wear it. It was always her choice.”

    Lynn points to another iconic piece of knitwear – the bright-pink llama-themed jumper she wore at Balmoral just before the wedding. “She loved ‘country-house dressing’ but with a twist – so she wore the fun pink jumper with classic jodhpurs or trousers tucked into her Hunter wellies, or the fantastic tweed bomber jacker she wore, converting a country wardrobe classic with a contemporary youthful twist.”

    The way in which Diana became more and more adept at her messaging through fashion has been well documented. In the exhibition Diana: Her Fashion Story, her journey from ingenue to powerful communicator was explored. Lynn, who curated the exhibition, says that, with the help of couturiers, “a new world opened up for her, where fashion could be a pivotal communicator. And she had a lot of fun with it. She began to realise, after the wedding [in 1981], the impact she was having, and she retained the playfulness and subversiveness, knowingly pushing the boundaries”.

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  • How female Fauvists were some of history’s most audacious painters

    How female Fauvists were some of history’s most audacious painters

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    In some ways, the works were a form of socially acceptable erotica, sold to bourgeois men who didn’t dare participate in the lurid night life of Montmartre themselves, but were titillated by scenes of it. Made by men for men, the artworks inevitably reflected the same obsessions.

    Fauvism, with its brash colours and vigorous brush work, might seem rebellious and anti-establishment, but the male artists’ portrayal of women perpetuated the same old stereotypes. “They are not the crazy anarchists that we tend to believe they are,” says Fink. “They were all petit-bourgeois, they had families, and they were members of the art committees of the time.” And since it was predominantly men both creating and buying the art, he explains, a patriarchal perspective pervaded.

    There’s the trope of the female as closer to nature, for example, with pieces such as The Dance by Derain (1906) and Dance by Matisse (1909-10) ascribing women with a primitive, naïve quality. In her 1973 essay Virility and Domination in Early 20th-Century Vanguard Painting, feminist art historian Carol Duncan describes “the absoluteness with which women were pushed back to the extremity of the nature side of the dichotomy, and the insistence with which they were ranked in total opposition to all that is civilised and human”. The “beastliness” of Fauvism clearly extended to the representation of women. “A young woman has young claws, well sharpened,” Matisse once said.

    But, says Fink, there’s “a clear distinction” in the way Fauves represented different women. “They depict their wives in an idolised way, in a way, morally superior. They’re dignified in their presence. Whereas, informed by late 19th-Century discourses, there’s this other extreme, where many of the portraits of the Fauves that are sexual, focus not on the face of the woman, but really on the flesh, on the genitals, on the breasts. There’s this depiction of a sexual appetite, of virility, that is not present at all in the family portraits.”

    In contrast to his dressed models, Matisse’s nudes − such as Pastoral (1905) and Nude in a Forest (1906) − tend to be turned away, faceless and objectified, lacking in personality and relegated to lines and curves. Even a still life, such as Goldfish and Sculpture (1911), is a case in point. “It’s quite extreme,” agrees Fink. “The buttocks of the woman are enlarged quite significantly.” The Fauves, aware of the taboo, argued that they had a “formal” interest in women, he says. “But obviously it goes beyond that.”

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  • Pain Hustlers review: Emily Blunt is ‘the only reason to watch this’

    Pain Hustlers review: Emily Blunt is ‘the only reason to watch this’

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    The film’s biggest problem is that Liza’s success seems unconnected to the deadly product she sells until very near the end. David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter movies and its Fantastic Beasts prequels, knows how to create a fluent narrative even here. But it’s as if he and the screenwriter, Wells Tower, were too timid to go all in on being entertaining about such an important subject, but too worried about being a downer to weave the dark side of the story through convincingly. That is a tricky balancing act, as demonstrated by Painkiller, which went so far the other way it bludgeoned viewers with the obvious.

    In Pain Hustlers, one patient says in a quick word to the camera that Lonafen “gave me back my life for a minute”, but it’s left to us to recognise that minute is the point, even after we later see two of his teeth fall out in his hand. Instead, the story focuses on Liza and Zanna’s rise, the tone echoing their euphoria as the company soars from near-bankruptcy to the top of the market. Catherine O’Hara has brief but lively scenes as Liza’s wild-child mother, and Brian d’Arcy James plays a venal doctor who is also a buffoon. When the film turns more serious and leans into its moral issue, the shift registers as viewer whiplash.

    And as much as Blunt gives her life, Liza is finally too artificial a construction, made to appeal to us as the best version of the pain hustler she is. Her daughter desperately needs medical care that insurance won’t cover, a blatant device to justify her choice to keep working for Zanna even after her conscience begins to kick in.

    With the final credits we see real-life news reports about the inspiration for Garcia’s character, Dr John Kapoor, who was convicted of bribery. By then Pain Hustlers has veered too far into fantasyland for anything real to matter.

    ★★☆☆☆

    Pain Hustlers is released in select US cinemas on 20 October and on Netflix internationally on 27 October.

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  • Next Goal Wins review: Taika Waititi hits the back of the net with this winning, hilarious football comedy

    Next Goal Wins review: Taika Waititi hits the back of the net with this winning, hilarious football comedy

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    The coach, Thomas Rongen, is played by Irish superstar Michael Fassbender. It’s excellent casting as Fassbender’s reputation for playing serious characters with deep psychological flaws makes him the perfect straight-man. His Rongen is at an all-time low. The American Football Association has tired of his constant violent outbursts and is ready to sack him; his wife has left him for another man. He is left with little to no option but to fly around the world to a sleepy island with no football history and try to install some discipline and footballing nous. He soon regrets his decision when he starts to meet the players, realising that they don’t share his belief that football is more important than life and death. Hailing from a country of only 45,000, these hapless amateurs all have multiple jobs, among them cameraman for the local television station, bar owner, waiter and taxi driver. 

    The most unusual aspect of this American Samoan football team is not their tragic inability to score. At the side’s heart is a player going through hormone therapy, transitioning from man to woman. The character is based on Jaiyah Saelua, who is fa’afafine, which refers to a “third gender” as understood in Polynesian society. Saelua was the first openly non-binary and trans woman to compete in a Fifa World Cup qualifier and, since the documentary’s success, has become a global equality ambassador for the organisation.

    While the documentary tells this story with great care and sincerity, Waititi’s directing superpower is to take this story, turn it into a broad, light-hearted comedy, and somehow do so while retaining the tale’s social relevance – and not being offensive. Newcomer Kaimana plays Jaiyah as a kind, soft-hearted soul with a demonic streak that appears whenever someone calls her Johnny. Rongen makes this error only once.

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  • Hip-hop’s rise to the top of fashion

    Hip-hop’s rise to the top of fashion

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    Hip-hop lyrics have long declared the importance of fashion in the genre. In 1992, Mary J Blige released What’s the 411? as part of her debut album of the same name. The single featured a rap by Maxwell Dixon that explicitly shouts out the US designer Tommy Hilfiger. “It was epic,” Hilfiger tells BBC Culture. “He was co-signing the brand, and it gave us credibility.” In the hip hop world, co-signing is when a usually successful artist endorses or supports another artist.

    Then came a Saturday Night Live TV performance by Snoop Dogg in March 1994. Hilfiger recalls: “Snoop broadcast the brand to the world, wearing a red, white and blue striped rugby [shirt] with ‘Tommy’ emblazoned across the chest on SNL.” While Snoop Dogg’s outfit doesn’t appear out of the ordinary today, for many viewers at the time, it would have been the first sighting of a hip hop artist wearing Tommy Hilfiger, a brand now strongly associated with the genre. “Our designs had bold, bright colours, oversized silhouettes, and a playful prep vibe –  they captured hip-hop’s relaxed energy,” says Hilfiger. “It was real and so much fun. We wanted to continue working with these exciting artists, so we started dressing stars of the time, including Puff Daddy, TLC, Destiny’s Child and Wu-Tang.”

    For women, much of early hip-hop style came from re-working men’s clothes, and in 1997 US hip-hop artist Aaliyah starred in a Tommy Hilfiger fashion campaign wearing low-rise jeans with a pair of the designer’s boxers peeking out and a men’s shirt cut into a bandeau top. “She made it tomboy sexy,” Andy Hilfiger, brother and business partner of Tommy, tells BBC Culture. “Still to this day, people are dressing like that.”

    Preppy affluence

    But there is more to the appeal of brands like Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren than just how the clothes looked. It was that they were associated with preppiness and affluence. According to Elena Romero, co-curator of a recent Fashion Institute of Technology exhibition, Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip Hop, part of hip hop’s attraction to luxury brands is aspirational. “That goes back to [hip hop’s] early roots, where so much of [luxury fashion] seemed so unattainable, and thus it was a status symbol,” she tells BBC Culture. Hip-hop artists and their fans were from multicultural working-class neighbourhoods who would be unable to easily afford luxury brands. “The whole idea of being on yachts and caviar dreams, those were lifestyles we had no access to,” Romero says, explaining that she grew up with hip hop herself. “And the celebrities of our community became our superheroes, who made it possible for us to see ourselves in that space and beyond.”

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  • Lee review from TIFF: Kate Winslet scores her best ever role in this biopic of a Vogue model-turned WW2 photographer

    Lee review from TIFF: Kate Winslet scores her best ever role in this biopic of a Vogue model-turned WW2 photographer

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    When she becomes accredited as a journalist by the US military, the film truly comes to match the importance of her work, and gives us the measure of its emotional psychological cost. She goes to Normandy, and faces fire during a battle in St Malo, France (that opening scene). Davey joins her as they cover the war across Europe. “We drove for months, didn’t wash for weeks,” we hear the older Miller say as we see them in a jeep driving through dusty streets. After Paris is liberated, she finds her way amidst crumbling buildings to visit Solange, and in one of the film’s most wrenching scenes, learns how horrific the war has been even for those who survived.

    Winslet let us see the toll that knowledge takes, as Miller forces herself to look at and document the most unbearable scenes. When the war ends, she and Davey enter Germany and go to Dachau. We do not see what Miller does when she enters one room, but in the interviewer’s hand we see the photograph she took that day, of piles of corpses. Kuras modulates all this in a style that smoothly takes us into Miller’s experience and unique point of view, but with an eloquent understatement.

    The war scenes speak loudly on their own, with no need to add dramatic emphasis. Alexandre Desplat’s score matches that style, with a subtle, piercing beauty. If the first half of Lee had been as dazzlingly effective as the second, it might have been a great film instead of a very good one.

    Penrose’s biography includes a letter she wrote about her difficulty crossing the border into Hungary in 1945, when Russian guards pointed guns at her. “The adventures were good cinema,” she said. In the end, they certainly were.

    ★★★★☆

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  • Dumb Money review: GameStop comedy is ‘funny, irreverent and crowd-pleasing’

    Dumb Money review: GameStop comedy is ‘funny, irreverent and crowd-pleasing’

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    The important part social media played in the GameStop story is not examined here so much as it is used, effectively, as a visual prop, with montages of crude Reddit comments and news clips of financial journalists. The real-life Wall Street figures, played by a starry line-up, are introduced at the start in ascending order of wealth. Seth Rogen is the hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin.

    As he wanders around his massive property, text on screen tells us his net worth is $400m. That’s impressive until we see that he is on the phone with Steven Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio), another hedge fund manager, worth $12bn. Then comes Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), whose investment company gives him a net worth of $16bn. The more they have, the more they have to lose. These characters are all played for comic effect, not as moustache-twirling villains. The film’s benign attitude is that they may lose billions, but they’ll be just fine.

    At one point, Gill’s investment balloons to $11m, while Plotkin’s hedge fund has lost several billion. GameStop shares fell back to Earth after the trading app Robinhood, which so many of the small investors had used, restricted trading on the stock to avoid a market crash. The US Congress asked the players in the whole incident to testify about their practices, and as the film ends we see Dano, Rogen and Offerman in that Zoom testimony, intercut with real Congressional representatives. Rehearsing for the hearing, Plotkin’s media advisors have to tell him that his extensive and expensive wine collection is not the best visual backdrop. He seems befuddled. There are no real villains in this comedy of errors, just dumb and dumber money. 

    ★★★☆☆

    Dumb Money is released in the UK and US on 22 September.

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  • The Boy and the Heron review: Miyazaki’s ‘last’ film is a masterpiece

    The Boy and the Heron review: Miyazaki’s ‘last’ film is a masterpiece

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    Hayao Miyazaki is one of the great masters of cinema, whose work happens to be animated, in hand-drawn films of exquisite delicacy and beauty. They are grounded by  thoroughly believable young heroes and heroines who often find themselves in otherworldly landscapes, like the girl in Spirited Away (2001), who wanders into a country of ghosts, or the young woman in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), with its house that floats through time and space.

    The Boy and the Heron, the 82-year-old Miyazaki’s first film in a decade, amounts to a summing up of many strands of his long career, with a magical castle, forays into the spirit world and the weighty reality of World War Two. Told through the eyes of a boy named Mahito, whose journey takes him from a bombing in wartime Tokyo to a land where he is menaced by pink parakeets bigger than he is, this may be Miyazaki’s most expansive and magisterial film. If it is not the most instantly stunning, that might be because he takes the time to deliver worlds within worlds, layers under layers, to create an overwhelming experience by the end.

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    The film starts with the sound of a siren and an explosive scene. During World War Two, the hospital where Mahito’s mother works catches fire, red-orange flames filling the night sky. Mahito races through the street toward her, embers flying around him, but the hospital collapses and she dies. A year later he and his father move to the country, where his father continues working for a company that makes wartime planes for Japan, just like the hero of Miyazaki’s last film, The Wind Rises, (2013) and the director’s own father. And his father has married Natsuko, the younger sister of Mahito’s mother. The loneliness we see on the boy’s face there is unmistakable, another sign of how brilliantly Miyazaki brings to life characters who visually exist in bold outlines. You cannot dismiss them as cartoons.  

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  • How pop star Olivia Rodrigo became a defining voice of Gen Z

    How pop star Olivia Rodrigo became a defining voice of Gen Z

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    (Image credit: Getty Images)

    Since her single Drivers License became a global phenomenon, Olivia Rodrigo hasn’t looked back. With her second album Guts out on Friday, Nick Levine examines her cleverly-calibrated appeal.

    E

    Every decade has its pre-eminent pop stars – from The Beatles in the 1960s to Madonna and Michael Jackson in the 1980s, and on to Taylor Swift in the 2010s. At just 20 years old, California-born Olivia Rodrigo is already a defining voice of the 2020s. Her spiky, emotionally heightened pop-rock songs resonate not just with the singer’s Gen Z peers, but older generations too. “Part of her appeal is that she gives you permission to feel everything and not to have to dilute anything, which is very necessary after the last few years,” music writer Rhian Daly tells BBC Culture, pointing to our collective need for post-pandemic release.

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    Out on Friday, Rodrigo’s second album Guts is comfortably among this year’s most anticipated pop records. It has already yielded a transatlantic number one single, Vampire, which demonstrates Rodrigo’s range by beginning as a hushed piano ballad before building into a mini rock opera. Rodrigo has said she was inspired by 1990s female artists “who aren’t afraid to be angry and remorseful and like spiteful and snarling,” and you can definitely hear this when she crisply eviscerates an ex for “bleedin’ me dry like a goddamn vampire”.

    Olivia Rodrigo performing Driver's License at the 2021 Brit awards; the song broke streaming records (Credit: Getty Images)

    Olivia Rodrigo performing Driver’s License at the 2021 Brit awards; the song broke streaming records (Credit: Getty Images)

    The album’s other trailer single, Bad Idea Right?, is driven by a chugging guitar riff that nods to the 1980s new wave era, but Rodrigo’s vocal delivery is coolly contemporary. When she repeatedly asks whether reconnecting with an ex is a “bad idea, right?” before swearing and saying “it’s fine”, it comes off as funny and relatable. “The key to Rodrigo’s songwriting is her ability to tell a great story in a way that feels like a conversation or as if you’re reading her diary,” says Daly, who also praises the singer for penning lyrics that capture “how people of her generation speak”.

    Like her blockbuster debut album, 2021’s Sour, which went four-times platinum in the US, Rodrigo crafted Guts with producer Dan Nigro. Rodrigo isn’t the only Gen Z superstar with a go-to collaborator – Billie Eilish writes almost exclusively with her brother Finneas – but this partnership still feels noteworthy given that many modern pop hits are polished to a high sheen by larger songwriting teams. Rodrigo explained in an interview with Zane Lowe for his Apple Music show how she loves working with Nigro, who has also written with Lewis Capaldi and Caroline Polachek, among others, because he “cares enough” to tell her when she can do better. As she recalled, after she played Nigro an early version of Drivers License, the stunningly intimate ballad that would become her breakthrough hit, he told her: “Yeah, that’s great, but you need to, like, finish the chorus.”

    Drivers License was an instant global phenomenon. Four days after it was released in January 2021, it broke Spotify’s record for the most single-day streams by a non-Christmas-themed track. At the time, Rodrigo was relatively unknown to pop fans, though she had already starred in two Disney Channel series: the quirky comedy Bizaardvark and meta mockumentary High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. In the latter, which she only left last year, she played budding singer-songwriter Nini Salazar-Roberts and contributed songs to the soundtrack. When her plaintive, self-penned ballad All I Want became a surprise Billboard Hot 100 hit in 2020, it essentially soft-launched Rodrigo’s recording career and helped her to secure a very favourable record deal where she retains control of her masters.

    A teen star with a difference

    Though Rodrigo cut her teeth on teen-oriented shows, she never really had to shake off the “Disney star” shadow that followed Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez in the late 2000s. Hugh McIntyre, a music journalist with Forbes, attributes this to the “more fractured” entertainment landscape she came up in. Through her Disney Channel work, Rodrigo had “built a brand” that appealed to a younger demographic while simultaneously “remaining under the radar for the rest of the populace”. For this reason, Drivers License felt like the arrival of a wildly talented new artist, not a grown-up pivot from a previously winsome teen star.

    Rodrigo first made her name in Disney channel shows such as High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (Credit: Disney)

    Rodrigo first made her name in Disney channel shows such as High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (Credit: Disney)

    Rodrigo cemented her meteoric rise in May 2021 by performing Drivers License at the Brit Awards, the UK’s leading music awards ceremony. Ten days later, she released Sour to overwhelmingly positive reviews. Across her 34-minute debut, she displayed an impressive ability to mix frenetic pop-punk gems like Good 4 U, another transatlantic chart-topper, with heart-rending ballads. On Deja Vu, she reminds a piano-playing ex that she “was the one who taught you Billy Joel” – a prime example of her highly evocative style. “Even though she is singing about her own specific experiences, her lyrics have a universality to them,” Daly says. This gift for intimacy is arguably even more impressive because Rodrigo never illuminates her songwriting by discussing her relationships. “I don’t kiss and tell,” she told Vogue in July, while also acknowledging that she does “understand” why people might be interested in her love life. 

    Rodrigo’s coming-of-age tales and heartbreak vignettes are often encased in cleverly retro packages. Sour’s fifth single Brutal recalls 1990s Britpop band Elastica and features a guitar riff similar to the one that drives Elvis Costello’s 1978 new wave hit Pump It Up. For McIntyre, these nods to pop’s past are integral to her broad appeal. “She is creating sort of a radio-friendly version of the pop-punk that millennials grew up with, so to them, it feels nostalgic and familiar,” he says. “Whereas among her younger [listeners], a lot of them are discovering [this sound] for the first time.” Rodrigo has really leant into this nostalgia with her choice of live covers. During 2022’s Sour Tour, she sang Avril Lavigne’s 2002 pop-rock smash Complicated, No Doubt’s 1995 feminist anthem Just a Girl and Veruca Salt’s 1994 grunge nugget Seether. 

    Most notably of all, Rodrigo welcomed Lily Allen to the stage at last year’s Glastonbury music festival for a pointed rendition of the British singer’s 2009 diatribe Fuck You. Rodrigo dedicated it to “the five members of the Supreme Court” who had recently voted to overturn Roe v Wade, thereby allowing individual US states the power to restrict access to abortions. It was one of her first overtly political moments and made headlines across the world, a sign of Rodrigo’s burgeoning status as a voice of her generation.

    Her first taste of controversy

    Rodrigo’s fondness for pop nostalgia has certainly widened her appeal, but it also led to her first significant controversy as an artist. When Sour was released in May 2021, Taylor Swift and her producer Jack Antonoff were credited as co-writers on the emotive piano ballad 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back because of the way it “interpolates” – or musically imitates – Swift’s song New Year’s Day. Rodrigo told Billboard that she wrote a verse and a chorus, then “decided to sing it over the chords of New Year’s Day” and “was lucky enough to get that approved [from Swift]”. However, two other Sour tracks have since had writing credits added retroactively after fans spotted similarities with other songs.

    Rodrigo's expletive-filled duet with Lily Allen at Glastonbury has become one of her defining moments so far (Credit: Getty Images)

    Rodrigo’s expletive-filled duet with Lily Allen at Glastonbury has become one of her defining moments so far (Credit: Getty Images)

    Swift, Antonoff and Annie Clark (aka indie musician St Vincent) were added to Deja Vu’s credits because Rodrigo’s vocal performance pays homage to Swift’s delivery on Cruel Summer. Rodrigo had previously told Rolling Stone that she loves the “harmonised yells” on Swift’s track and “wanted to do something like that”. Then Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Josh Farro were retroactively credited on Good 4 U because of a broader sonic similarity with their 2007 pop-punk hit Misery Business, which had been highlighted by fan-made mash-ups. Artists have been more willing to hand over songwriting credits in this way since a landmark 2015 court case in which a jury ruled that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’ Blurred Lines had borrowed from Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up simply because the two songs share a similar “feel”. Still, accusations of “plagiarism” must have stung Rodrigo at such a pivotal point in her young career.

    However, it is worth noting that not every musician views Rodrigo’s homages as a form of plagiarism. When a fan tweeted that Brutal is “pretty much a direct lift from Elvis Costello”, the British veteran replied: “It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy.” Daly argues that Rodrigo was “absolutely correct” when she told Teen Vogue that “nothing in music is ever new”. “Seeing your debut album picked apart by people online accusing you of plagiarism must have been tough,” Daly adds, “[but] she handled it pretty graciously.” Meanwhile, McIntyre believes it is “definitely significant” that Rodrigo hails Swift as an influence because it underlines her status as a truly next-generation star. “We now live in a world where [young] artists like Rodrigo and Billie Eilish grew up on Taylor Swift, which might be kind of surprising to millennial fans who see Swift as their peer,” he says.

    The elegant way Rodrigo weathered this controversy also suggests she possesses the right temperament for a long-term pop career. It was impossible not to empathise when she told Time that “it was really frustrating to see people discredit and deny my creativity”. This incredible creativity is now set to enchant fans again with Guts, an album “about figuring stuff out, failures and successes and making mistakes”. Very few artists can write about these messy milestones in a way that resonates with listeners from different age groups, which is why Rodrigo’s rise is unlikely to slow any time soon. When she spills her guts into a song, millions feel seen.

    Guts is out on 8 September.

    If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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  • How to dye clothes at home – naturally

    How to dye clothes at home – naturally

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    Personal effects | Sustainability

    (Image credit: Getty Images)

    Plant-based dyeing is big on social media, and an eco-friendly alternative to industrial methods, but what does this ancient craft actually involve? Bel Jacobs talks to experienced practitioners about their passion.

    N

    Natural dye specialist Babs Behan laughs when asked about her favourite natural dye plant. “Like people, they all have such a beautiful variety of different characteristics,” she says. “But, if I had to choose one, indigo stands out. It’s not like any other dye. It’s not water soluble – so you have to go through this charming, alchemical, almost mystical process, to make it bond with the fibre. Then you take the fabric out of the water and you’ll see it turn from green to blue as it oxidises. There’s something so special about that because it’s the colour of our planet. It’s the colour of the sky and the sea – and we can’t capture it from anywhere except from this one indigo pigment.” 

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    –          Why drawing is the best digital detox

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    Behan, a pioneer in UK-based large-scale natural dye productions, is one of a cohort of committed natural dye specialists seeing a resurgence in their craft: the dyeing of fabrics with colours derived from plants. Online courses and communities have blossomed, with more and more practitioners wanting to share their skills. Bella Gonshorovitz’s book Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear was a surprise hit in 2022, combining instructions on natural dye with plant-based recipes, vegetable growing and zero-waste clothing design. After her first successful publication Botanical Inks in 2018, Behan has just released a second, Botanical Dyes. 

    Babs Behan is a natural-dye enthusiast – she describes the process as "alchemical" (Credit:Kim Lightbody/ Botanical Dyes/ Quadrille)

    Babs Behan is a natural-dye enthusiast – she describes the process as “alchemical” (Credit:Kim Lightbody/ Botanical Dyes/ Quadrille)

    In 2022, campaign group Fashion Revolution chose a dye garden for its Chelsea Flower Show presentation. Meanwhile, influencers on TikTok have given #plantdyeing the rubber stamp of a new generation. An ancient craft, natural dyeing is a practice whose time has come again, with hand tie-dyed fashion also making a comeback in recent years.

    The resurgence has been encouraged by Covid lockdowns, “which allowed people to explore the craft at home,” says natural-dyeing enthusiast and teacher Susan Dye (who says she has “no idea whether my name tracks back to plant dyers in my family tree”.) It’s unlikely, though, that the practice would have caught on in quite the same way if not for a continually growing discomfort about fashion’s heavy footprint. From carbon emissions and animal cruelty to union busting and the reality of working in an industry when the pace is hectic and optics are everything, fashion is under considerable scrutiny. The way we colour our clothes feels late to the party – all those bright patterns hanging on clothing rails in shops come at a terrible cost.

    “Put it this way, 97% of dyes used in the industry are petrochemically based,” says sustainable fashion consultant Jackie Andrews, who worked as head of textiles for Stella McCartney and helped advise the UN Ethical Fashion Initiative. “We’ve got net zero targets which mean we’re going to have to remove all those petrochemicals from the manufacturing cycle.”

    Fashion is a huge polluter. According to the UN Environment Programme, the industry is responsible for up to one-fifth of all industrial water pollution – due to the fact that most clothes today are produced in poorer countries where regulation is weak and enforcement weaker still. Wastewater is dumped directly into rivers and streams; a potent cocktail of carcinogenic chemicals, dyes, salts and heavy metals that not only poison the land but also the water sources of all those, both people and animals, who rely on them. The rivers in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka have turned black due to the sludge produced by textile dyeing and processing factories. The most polluting colour of all? Black, beloved of chic fashion editors everywhere. 

    Many of today's natural dyers grow their own dye plants (Credit: Kim Lightbody/ Botanical Dyes/ Quadrille )

    Many of today’s natural dyers grow their own dye plants (Credit: Kim Lightbody/ Botanical Dyes/ Quadrille )

    It’s easy to see why someone who cares about people, planet and animals, as well as clothes, might turn to natural plant dyeing. From the beauty of the raw materials – often wild plants – and the considered pace of the process; from its connection across time and continents, to the local communities it creates, plant dyeing feels like a quiet but steely act of rebellion. This is why, while beginners might start with simply changing the colour of their clothes, other worlds start to open. Many of today’s natural dyers grow their own dye plants, work on local community projects, run workshops and demonstrations, and agitate for change in industrialised fashion systems and beyond. 

    Five clothes-dyeing tips

    1. Upcycle old clothing that has greyed or faded over time with colours from plants
    2. Grow dye plants like marigolds for yellow, madder root for red, indigo or woad for blue
    3. Natural dye will only bond with natural fibre: cotton, linen, flax, silk and wool
    4. Take account of shrinkage while simmering – wool may shrink significantly
    5. Some of the natural chemicals in plants aren’t safe to digest or inhale – always work in a well-ventilated environment

    The challenge – and the joy – of plant dyeing is to learn it well. “There is a lot of diversity among contemporary natural dyers, but what unites us is a love of colour and a taste for alchemy,” reflects Susan Dye. “Using a pile of unremarkable dried weld leaves to create a hank of electric-yellow yarn never ceases to give me a thrill. Dyeing requires a satisfying attention to both science and art. Whether consciously or not, successful natural dyers are masters of chemistry and biology. We learn how to extract dye molecules from plants and bind them to fibres. And in all kinds of processes, it’s important to control temperature, alkalinity, acidity.”

    Dyeing the rainbow

    That depth of knowledge is why most established dyers are wary of social media: “Influencers, with babies on their hip, trying to show that natural dyeing is easy – when it’s not,” warns Andrews. “Learn the science of the craft,” advises Dye. “Understanding the chemistry allows you to appreciate how vibrant and long-lasting natural dyes can be.” It’s chemistry that will also help newbies understand, for example, that “green is the hardest colour to get from natural dyes, which people think is strange as it’s the colour we associate with plants,” says Behan. “But actually it’s the living colour, whereas often, we work with dead colours – the rich reds, peaches, oranges, yellows, browns that you get in autumn.”

    Natural dyes can be vibrant and long lasting – if used correctly (Credit: @wearelandlore)

    Natural dyes can be vibrant and long lasting – if used correctly (Credit: @wearelandlore)

    Magic happens all the time in plant dyeing but first-time dyers will need to know the basics. “Natural dye only bonds with natural fibre: cotton, linen, flax, silk and wool,” points out Gonshorovitz, who has been involved with a year-long programme of demonstrations and talks exploring natural dye as a crucial link in a circular economy (a system based on re-use and regeneration of materials). “Be aware that threads are almost always polyester-made, so external stitches and buttonholes, for example, will not dye. And take account of shrinkage. Due to the high temperature required by simmering, some garments – especially wool – shrink.” 

    “Always wash and rinse everything thoroughly with neutral soap to allow the dye to attach easily,” advises Dye. “New fabrics are often treated with chemicals to protect against damage; even used fabrics can have traces of conditioner or dry cleaning chemicals which resist dyes. Dyeing is like decorating,” she adds. “Preparing the surface to start with is tedious but well worth it for beautiful and long-lasting results.” For dyestuffs, begin at home – with food waste. “Avocado skins and stones for pinks; used tea bags and coffee grinds for yellows; squash pumpkin skins for orange,” says Behan. 

    “Start with easy golden yellows from pomegranate and onion skins which don’t need any mordants [fixing substances],” says Dye. “Save dried onion skins or pomegranate rinds until you have enough to fill a large saucepan. Simmer for an hour and strain before use. You can dye your items by long cold soaking or by heating in the dyebath until the colour is deep enough for you.” Due to high tannin content, the colours last well on cellulose fabrics like cotton, linen and hemp, even without mordanting, the process of fixing colour to fabrics. In natural dyeing, common mordants include iron and aluminium potassium sulphate, but also rhubarb leaves and plant-based milks. In fashion production, mordants might include benzidine, which has been linked to pancreatic cancer. That fact alone re-emphasises the contrast between synthetic and natural processes.

    Clothes dyeing in numbers

    • The fashion industry accounts for nearly 20% of wastewater
    • 97% of dyes used in the fashion industry are petrochemical-based
    • Textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of water globally
    • Around 70 million barrels of oil a year are used to make polyester fibres in clothes

    “DIY natural dyeing can be a bit punk, empowering and subversive. It requires no specialist equipment,” says Dye. “Upcycle old clothing that has greyed over time with natural colours from outside like eucalyptus, red dock, spring nettles, dandelion root,” says Behan. Revel in the results but remember to not over-romanticise botanical dyes. “Not everything that is natural is safe,” warns Gonshorovitz. “Some plant chemicals aren’t safe to digest and even inhale.” Always work in a well-ventilated environment and keep equipment used for food and dyeing separate. 

    Tie-dye, pictured here at Copenhagen fashion week, is having a resurgence (Credit: Getty Images)

    Tie-dye, pictured here at Copenhagen fashion week, is having a resurgence (Credit: Getty Images)

    Most of all, practitioners revel in a renewed connection with nature: “That’s the beauty [of natural dyeing]: that people can start to recognise plants,” says Andrews. “If we taught students to use natural dyes, they’d actually learn about the plants around them.” Earlier this year, Andrews hosted a Dyers Circle, with “100 Hues” of natural colours, at the Future Fabrics Expo in London’s Greenwich. “I literally just picked stuff on the wayside as we went in,” she laughs. “There was dock and cow parsley or Queen Anne’s Lace, a common source of yellow. Oak, of course. All the basics we used consistently up to the 1800s, when London was a wonderful dye centre. You have got basic madder, indigo, weld,” she continues. 

    But the real surprise comes, she says, with the sheer variety of indigenous flowers. Andrews has been researching the diversity of dye stuff used in Europe at Kew Gardens. “It’s fantastic. The list just goes on and on.” While the West works at reconnecting with its long history of natural dyes, indigenous cultures provide a continuous and exciting source of inspiration for practitioners. “One of my first experiences with natural dye was on a trip to Mexico in 2016, visiting the natural-dye workshops of Oaxaca,” says Gonshorovitz. “I am still fascinated by the way they practice there.”

    Glossary

    Mordant – a substance that fixes dye

    Circular economy – an economic system based on the reuse and regeneration of materials

    Fugitive dye – impermanent dye

    During her final year studying fine art and textiles at University of the Arts London, Behan travelled to India to explore natural dyes and block printing in Jaipur. “Local materials, pigments, fabrics, papers and wooden hand-carved blocks; everything handmade and 100% biodegradable and incredibly beautiful in a way that mass-produced prints aren’t: it made a lot of sense to me.” Since then, she has travelled the world, experimenting with other traditions. “In Peru, it’s hand-dyeing yarn and weaving. In Indonesia, it’s batik. [Natural dyeing] has a different character depending on plants and material and culture.” Her experiences have given her practice greater depth.

    The future for natural dyeing is as bright as the colours it offers. London College of Fashion’s Sarah May has been advocating for a dye garden at the college’s new site in East London. “Support from the students has been really positive; young people are really engaged,” she says. Course leaders and students across modules are exploring the possibilities of natural dyes in print, in embroidery, and in innovative bio-based formulas.

    Golden yellows can be created from pomegranate and onion skins (Credit: The Good Life Experience/ Something Good)

    Golden yellows can be created from pomegranate and onion skins (Credit: The Good Life Experience/ Something Good)

    “I’m really inspired by the current ‘new wave’ of dyers, who are versed in the scientific background but are happy to experiment with non-traditional dyes, different mordanting methods and fugitive [impermanent] dye” says Gonshorovitz. “I love the serendipity of natural dyeing, the fact that it would be hard to replicate the same shade – and the fact you can reinvigorate garments you already own in that way, rather than buy new ones for novelty. Natural dye embodies the rather technical term of circularity so well. It reminds us that all we consume comes from and returns to nature.”

    If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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  • The legacy of Star Trek: The Animated Series, 50 years on

    The legacy of Star Trek: The Animated Series, 50 years on

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    Star Trek: The Animated Series premiered 50 years ago, in September of 1973 during Saturday morning cartoons, but the show wasn’t written for children. Instead, it was very much conceived of as a continuation of The Original Series. Some of the episodes were direct sequels, such as More Tribbles, More Trouble, which is a continuation of the classic The Trouble with Tribbles, and featured the return of Cyrano Jones. Other episodes include How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth (the first Star Trek episode to win an Emmy award), in which an alien claiming to be a Mayan deity captures the Enterprise, as well as The Infinite Vulcan, written by Walter Koenig, in which a scientist tries to clone Spock.

    Dorothy (DC) Fontana led a group of writers from the original show who mostly wrote for a traditional, adult Star Trek audience. That’s why the show didn’t catch on – while it was well-received by critics, it might have done better in prime time. The show won a Daytime Emmy for best children’s series, but it was cancelled after two years because of low ratings. Roddenberry then moved on to work on another live-action series, called Phase II, which would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

    As a result, Star Trek: The Animated Series was largely forgotten by all but the most ardent Trek fans, sandwiched between the iconic original series and The Next Generation, which premiered in 1987. Because it was animation, and aired in a time slot aimed at children, many people who enjoyed The Original Series wrote it off as immature kids’ fare. But in recent years, The Animated Series has reasserted itself as an important part of Star Trek history.

    A new history

    Its status as a part of the franchise is still somewhat uncertain: fans have long-considered the two-year show as the latter years of the Enterprise’s five-year mission, but reportedly Gene Roddenberry himself did not consider The Animated Series to be part of the Star Trek canon. For many years, Paramount respected Roddenberry’s wishes, but since the rebirth of the television franchise with 2017’s Star Trek: Discovery, the show appears to be solidly ensconced within Star Trek’s history.

    Captain Robert April, a key character from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (a series that debuted in 2022, set a decade before The Original Series), was named as the first captain of the Enterprise in The Animated Series. Star Trek: Lower Decks (a series that launched in 2020) regularly references its animated predecessor as well – for example, Dr T’Ana is a Caitian, a species that was introduced on The Animated Series.

    In fact, Lower Decks has a direct connection to The Animated Series – it’s another animated show for adults, but this time the franchise has embraced it. They’ve even gone so far as to do a live-action crossover between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks in the episode Those Old Scientists.

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  • Origin review: Ava DuVernay’s bold, fascinating drama exposes a terrible framework of global bigotry

    Origin review: Ava DuVernay’s bold, fascinating drama exposes a terrible framework of global bigotry

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    But where Origin stands out is in its mix of theory and emotion. Isabel’s relationship with her husband Brett is an aspect of our protagonist’s romantic life but also her political one. When he suddenly passes away, Isabel is helped to process what has happened by her study of endogamy – the custom of marrying only within the limits of one’s own group. Her research allows her to both mourn and celebrate him as someone, by contrast, who defied the US caste system through love and understanding. It is a simple yet powerful demonstration of how educating oneself historically and sociologically can help nourish the soul and clarify personal struggles.

    The film is shot with a richly coloured, textured and timeless-looking film grain, only adding to its feeling of tangible literary importance. Where it occasionally falters is with notes of over-dramatisation that ring hollow, detracting from the otherwise refined storytelling. Scenes where Isabel is lying despairingly on a bed of autumn leaves, or is filmed interacting with figures of the past through abstract sequences – “you are going to be fine”, she tells one young black boy barred from entering a whites-only pool – feel somewhat jarring when placed alongside real recreations of horrifying events, such as black slaves being transported from the hull of ships from Africa to the US, or the separation of mothers and children at concentration camps during the Holocaust.

    “It happened, therefore it can happen again” – so goes the quote by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who is invoked within the film at a museum Isabel visits in Germany. If the Nazis were inspired by American methods of enslavement, as we learn in one scene, then future atrocities could be put in motion in the spirit of discrimination that is being perpetrated around the world today. Exploring this terrible framework, DuVernay’s film unfolds with unpreaching clarity and fierce focus, full of heart and vibrant intent.

    ★★★★☆

    If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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  • Noise, drugs and rioting fans: Inside the mayhem of Nick Cave’s early days with explosive rockers The Birthday Party

    Noise, drugs and rioting fans: Inside the mayhem of Nick Cave’s early days with explosive rockers The Birthday Party

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    The Australian band landed in London in 1980 with a thud of disappointment. “We hated the place,” the band’s singer, Nick Cave, says in an archive interview featured in the film. “It was repellent”, offers the band’s guitarist, Rowland S Howard, who died in 2009.

    A moderately successful band back home, originally known as the Boys Next Door, they left to conquer England and renamed themselves The Birthday Party – although they arrived broke, with drug addictions, and in a country that was as indifferent to them as they were disdainful of it. Within just three years the band would implode. But they left behind a short yet incendiary legacy and a catalogue of music that four decades on from the post-punk boom, remains a potent collection. While mimicked, their sound has arguably never been matched for its intensity.

    Arriving in the UK

    This whirlwind period is depicted in Mutiny in Heaven, a film that features rare and unseen archive footage, original artwork, unreleased tracks, live recordings, and studio footage of the band at work. “I wanted to create a world and drop the audience into it,” the director Ian White tells BBC Culture. “To try and bottle that essence of the late 70s and early 80s.” There’s no gushing talking heads from fans; instead the band are placed front and centre. “When the material is that good, do you need someone else telling you it’s good?” asks White. “It seemed superfluous to have commentators talking about how powerful the material was when you can see it.”

    The film traces their journey from Australia to England, where they ended up in a squalid bedsit they all shared. They had not found fame and fortune, but instead misery, destitution and malnutrition. Barry Adamson, who made his name with post-punkers Magazine in the late 70s and early 80s, but joined The Birthday Party for a few months on bass in 1982, tells BBC Culture: “I think they expected the streets to be paved with gold and with their names written everywhere but instead they landed in this pit of shit.”

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  • Hit Man review: Linklater’s latest is ‘genuinely fun’

    Hit Man review: Linklater’s latest is ‘genuinely fun’

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    Film | Venice Film Festival

    (Image credit: Brian Roedel)

    Richard Linklater’s New Orleans crime yarn starring Glen Powell is “delightful”, and has”‘humanity and charm”, writes Nicholas Barber from the Venice Film Festival.

    I

    If you’re looking for a laidback, heartwarming comedy that happens to be about deceit, corruption and murder, then Hit Man is the film for you. Directed and co-written by Richard Linklater, the maker of Boyhood, School of Rock and the Before trilogy, it may be too relaxed and slight to match his finest work, and it may not win any prizes at the Venice Film Festival, where it had its premiere this week. But this delightful New Orleans crime yarn has all of Linklater’s customary humanity and charm, as well as a quality that is scarce in cinemas today: it’s genuinely fun.

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    An opening caption promises a “somewhat true story” inspired by a university lecturer named Gary Johnson, who is played by Linklater’s co-writer, Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick). Gary tries to inspire his philosophy and psychology students with Nietzsche quotes about living on the edge, but he doesn’t exactly practise what he preaches. After work every day, this geeky birdwatching enthusiast drives his Honda Civic back to his suburban bungalow, where he feeds his cats, Id and Ego, and eats a quiet dinner at the world’s smallest kitchen table.

    But there is some excitement in Gary’s life. Skilled at electronics, he supplements his income with a part-time police surveillance job, recording people who think they are hiring a contract killer, but are actually incriminating themselves by talking to an undercover cop. Then he gets more excitement than he bargained for. When the cop who usually pretends to be an assassin is suspended, Gary has to stand in at the last minute – and to his and his colleagues’ amazement, he turns out to be a natural. As wimpy as he is most of the time, he has a gift for getting into the character of a cold-blooded murderer, and improvising the grisly details of the executions he claims to have made. He then uses his psychology expertise to vary his character from case to case, using different disguises and different personae to suit each potential client. Discovering a whole new side to himself, he has a ball – and Linklater and Powell are clearly having a ball, too. There are hilarious scenes of Gary trying out more and more outrageous outfits and accents, and getting more and more shocked reactions from his police handler (Retta).

    The inevitable complication arrives when he encounters a gorgeous young woman, Madison (Adria Arjona), who wants rid of her tyrannical husband. Sensing that her heart isn’t in it, Gary talks her out of the plan, and she repays him by asking him on a date. He knows that he should turn her down, but Linklater takes time and care to build the pair’s mutual attraction until the sexual chemistry is bubbling more fiercely than it has in the last dozen romantic comedies I’ve seen put together. As well as everything else, Hit Man is that rare film that convinces you that the hero and heroine really, really fancy each other. The snag is that Madison has the hots for a confident, dog-loving hit man, so what if she finds out that he is actually a meek, cat-loving academic?

    Hit Man

    Director: Richard Linklater

    Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Retta

    Run time: 1hr 53m

    There are other dangers inherent in living such a high-stakes double life, of course, and problems soon come from various amusingly unexpected places. But even when the situation gets fraught, Hit Man keeps its breezy feel-good mood. Another, crueller writer-director would have pivoted to scenes of bloody violence, but Linklater prefers to ponder the question of whether you can will yourself into becoming a different person. Could Gary’s assassin identity be a better and more authentic one than his lecturer identity? Linklater is also clever enough to address the legal and ethical issues of a scheme that is a whisker away from entrapment, and he offers a cheeky critique of all the many hitman movies that are foisted upon us every year. Contract killers don’t exist, he seems to say; they’re a daft pop-culture fantasy. You can’t blame Gary for enjoying that fantasy, especially when he lets us enjoy it so much, too.

    ★★★★☆

    Hit Man is released on 3 October in the US.

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  • Venice Film Festival: The controversial directors stirring debate

    Venice Film Festival: The controversial directors stirring debate

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    Paradoxically, that same feeling − that these once-powerful men are now verging on irrelevance – could help to explain their appearance in Venice. Several journalists who spoke to BBC Culture said that they felt the directors were no longer making films that would be widely seen, their twilight works being shown to a few thousand discerning cinephiles in a rarefied setting. However, anonymous protest banners appeared at the Lido on Sunday morning, according to The Hollywood Reporter, criticising the directors’ inclusion in the festival, followed by the protests outside the premiere of Coup de Chance on Monday.

    And although Allen’s film has been received relatively positively by critics – Rolling Stone called it “his best film in a decade” – some suggest that showing the men’s films might be a more suitable punishment than not showing them, as it could confirm their increasing irrelevance. Polanski’s The Palace, for example, turned out to be a stinker that was slated by every critic who saw it. One of those critics, The Evening Standard’s Jo-Ann Titmarsh, told BBC Culture that The Palace had, at a stroke, made it impossible for anyone to continue defending Polanski as a flawed genius. “If you don’t like Polanski,” she said, “Alberto Barbera has done you a favour by showing his film in Venice.”

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  • Priscilla review: Sofia Coppola has directed a ‘sympathetic tribute’ to Elvis’s wife

    Priscilla review: Sofia Coppola has directed a ‘sympathetic tribute’ to Elvis’s wife

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    A year on from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic, here’s the same story again from the perspective of Elvis’s wife. Adapted from Priscilla Presley’s memoir, Elvis and Me, it’s written and directed by Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette), a specialist in capturing the ennui of wealthy people in luxurious surroundings. Her approach could hardly be in starker contrast with Luhrmann’s. Priscilla is a subdued domestic drama, all soft lighting and soft voices, with no more than a glimpse of Elvis’s concerts or a note of his records – and, mercifully, no sign at all of Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker.

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    Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla Beaulieu, as she is known for the first half of the film. As Beaulieu’s stepfather is in the Air Force, she is living on a US base in Germany in 1959 when one of Elvis’s army buddies invites her to a party at his house. He (played by Jacob Elordi) is a 24-year-old superstar on military service, while she is a dimple-cheeked 14-year-old schoolgirl, but the film maintains that they had a long chaste courtship, and that Elvis simply wanted her company because he was homesick for the US and grieving for his recently deceased mother. Indeed, one of Priscilla’s main grievances later on is that, far from being a devilish seducer, Elvis preferred to keep things platonic between them for years after she is ready and willing to do the deed. The “intimacy co-ordinator” mentioned in the film’s end credits didn’t have a lot to do.

    Opinions will vary as to whether Coppola should really have been so polite about this cancel-worthy affair, and Priscilla Presley’s status as the film’s executive producer may well have affected her judgement. But the unsteamy relationship is a fascinating departure from the usual cliché of a hedonistic celebrity with an innocent young girlfriend. Elvis gives Priscilla pills to stay awake and pills to fall asleep, but rather than throwing her into a debauched underworld of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, he invites her to live in his house in Memphis, Tennessee, where he expects her to carry on with her schooling, dress demurely, and join him for evenings out at the roller-skating rink. His career highs and lows are things she hears about on the phone and reads about in gossip magazines, but she is never invited to share in them.

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  • The Killer is a boring disappointment

    The Killer is a boring disappointment

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    On one level, I realise, the dullness is the point. Fassbender’s character is meant to be a diligent nobody: not glamorous, not charming, neither ferociously cruel nor icily cold, and not even particularly gifted at his line of work. But I’m not sure that justifies the film’s own efficiently plodding approach because it never seems as if Fincher is giving us the inside track on how assassins actually operate. As ordinary as the protagonist is on one level, he isn’t any more believable than the balletic executioners in John Wick. He’s still a fantasy figure, even if he’s a fantasy figure who doesn’t dress in a snazzy suit, so The Killer ends up seeming hollow and pointless.

    Despite premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, it’s the kind of trifling exercise that Steven Soderbergh knocks out when he fancies trying out a new camera. Fincher has talked about making The Killer for well over a decade, but it still comes across as a relaxed holiday project. Perhaps, after Mank in 2020, he was in the mood to take on something cheaper and easier, so we can only hope that he sets his sights on a major work next time around.

    ★★☆☆☆

    The Killer is released on 27 October in selected cinemas, and on 10 November on Netflix.

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